Wernher von Braun wasn’t worried about helping to murder millions of people, but he was concerned about the solitude of astronauts during space travel. Odd priorities.

The philosophical spelunker Michel Siffre went so far as to embed himself in caves and icebergs for months at a time in the 1960s and 1970s to understand prolonged isolation. Time stopped having meaning for him. The pristine terrain he ultimately explored was inside his own head.

It’s perplexing in this age of robotics that extended space trips to Mars and such need to have humans at all. They’re far cheaper with just robots and can collect the same information. While colonization is the ultimate goal, it needn’t be the immediate one.

But we’re likely going up sooner than later, since peopled space flights are an easier sell. They flatter us, remind us of ourselves. Therefore, the loneliness of the long distance “runner” is a complicated problem for NASA and private programs. The longest such experiment testing human endurance in seclusion has just begun.

From the BBC:

A team of NASA recruits has begun living in a dome near a barren volcano in Hawaii to simulate what life would be like on Mars.

The isolation experience, which will last a year starting on Friday, will be the longest of its type attempted.

Experts estimate that a human mission to the Red Planet could take between one and three years.

The six-strong team will live in close quarters under the dome, without fresh air, fresh food or privacy.

They closed themselves away at 15:00 local time on Friday (01:00 GMT Saturday).

A journey outside the dome – which measures only 36ft (11m) in diameter and is 20ft (6m) tall – will require a spacesuit.

A French astrobiologist, a German physicist and four Americans – a pilot, an architect, a journalist and a soil scientist – make up the NASA team.

The men and women will each have a small sleeping cot and a desk inside their rooms. Provisions include powdered cheese and canned tuna.•